Rich people give to charities to aggrandize themselves. Charities, needing donations, trim their sails to appease self-aggrandizing rich people. Not hard to see how this can lead to the charity in effect doing more to serve its patrons than the people it actually claims to help, and based on some up-close experience, I would say that is not an academic concern.

The whole point of EA is to move toward a system where charities are judged by the good they do and not their marketing campaign.

AMF and other top givewell charities seem far more focused on the good they can do than more classic charities like WWF or Plan Parenthood.

And what theory of Good determines how we do that judging? The different "schools" of EA seem to have radically different approaches ("longtermism" versus maximizing QALYs for living beings).

And even this punts on perceptive utility, the kind that Nozick warns us about[1]: it's entirely possible that Johnny in Country X gets more utility out of $100 in charitable giving than 50 others in Country Y. But this seems like a really bad logical consequence, the kind that the Internet Rationalist EA community uses to justify spending money on AGI research instead of donating to AMF.

Overall, it's much easier to live in a world where we can determine that some set of charities are worth giving to, and not try too hard to order between them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

Do you think it's good to donate to charities?

Do you think that some charities are more effective than other ones?

Do you think we should try to measure that to determine which ones are more effective?

I think giving to charities is supererogatory, at best. At worst, it’s a reflection of a heteronomous will.

When one considers that there are numerous charities with exact opposite goals I’m not sure how you can consider your three questions to have self-evident answers.

Most charities don't have a charity with an exact opposite goal.

Most charitable donations are net good. Sure there exist a small subset of charities that aren't probably doing harm but that's the exception.

Would you argue that charitable giving is neutral or bad?

In some light it could be seen as "bad," at least as currently structured in this country: we basically allow people to withhold tax money and instead direct the money as they see fit, which has an anti-democratic implications -- in effect it as though we went to the richest Americans and said "why don't you decide how a substantial chunk of tax dollars are spent rather than Congress?" Beyond the more philosophical aspects, having been in the sausage factory for a bit, and having read about others, I think it is very easy for charities to just happen to serve their mission in a way that just happens to be more beneficial for their patrons (even if they could put superficially convincing numbers on it to prove they're highly "effective").

But I suppose I would say it's neutral; it could be good or bad depending on various characteristics of the charity itself.

I think on avg. charities aren't so bad that the world is better off if you buy a yacht and give 20% to the government than to donate it to the average charity.

But do you at least agree the government does less good with 20 cents than a givewell charity like the AMF does with a dollar?

I am rather skeptical of the notion that this can be meaningfully quantified.

Surely you think between two charities, one that takes a $1,000 and buys caviar for starving children and one that feeds 1000x as many bread the second one does more good per $ than the first.

Sure, it is easy to invent fantastically silly uses of money. Is that what is at issue?

Kinda, yes.

It's certainly the scale of impact difference between some of the charities:

Charities can be useless or actively harmful: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/im...

vs.

$4500/life saved: https://www.givewell.org/our-giving-funds#Top_Charities_Fund

They also say why it's that high: https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates

Another example I've heard is hospitals asking people to stop skydiving to raise money for them, as the mean cost of medial care the average skydiver needs due to skydiving injuries exceeds the average money raised by skydiving.

They matter to people who aren't Utilitarians (like me!). I'm much more interested in motive than I am in outcome (although I like Good Things, just like everyone else).

Here's a hopefully intuitive framing: actions are built on outcomes, while institutions are built on motives. It's hard to imagine a consequential derivation of fundamental and inviolable human rights, for example: there will always be cases and circumstances where a consequential view of morality enables you to engage in casuistry to suit the occasion. I'd much rather build (and live under) practical moral systems where things stay right and wrong.

(To be clear: motive itself is not the moral object, in my view. Motive is merely the thing being questioned. The moral object is the moral law.)

So you think it's better to judge charities by what we think of their motives instead of how much they help people?

No. What I think is that ordering between charities is a morally insensible act.

So you think all charities are equally good, and applying any ordinality to them is insane?

Why do you think all charities are equally good?

Also no. I don’t know where you’re getting that.

There are good charities, and there are bad charities. One of the things that can make a charity bad is having a bad mission. Another thing that can make a charity bad is being corrupt or inefficient. But I don’t presume to order charities based on how bad or good they are, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly good about giving to one good charity versus another good charity.

Also, “insensible” does not mean “insane.” I meant that it does not make sense, in my moral system.

So you're happen to separate charities into "good" and "bad" but wouldn't be ok breaking them down into "bad" "ok" "good" or "bad" "good" better?

You're happy to assign a number of 1 or 0, but would never want to rank them any more than that? That doesn't make sense to me.

I'm perfectly happy to establish my own preferences: I tend to donate to journalistic and legal aid nonprofits. That's what I prefer, but I don't operate under the belief that I prefer those things because they're better, morally speaking, than donating to famine relief or animal care nonprofits.

There are lots of ethical theories (a majority, in fact!) that don't require (but may admit) grading actions on a sliding scale from "morally worst" to "morally best." Moral systems all boil down to a Theory of Right, and it's possible to have a Theory of Right rooted in virtue or autonomy rather than Good (i.e., greatest consequence).

I make no claim at to where our current world is on this spectrum, but there is some point on it where a world full of some tiny number of extremely rich people who shower money on the poor, even to the point of material scarcity largely vanishing, but everyone in this world is a dickhead to each other, is a worse world than a world that still has material scarcity but is full of people who honestly and legitimately care for each other.

This is probably far more obvious at small units like families, where we are all well aware of the existence of absolutely miserable rich kids who might live short, drug-addicted lives that end in suicide, in spite of their parents giving them all the money in the world.